Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
It’s been more than five months since I first got my hands on a Google Pixel 8 Pro and took my first photo with it. At the time, I immediately noticed an irritating change in the Google Camera interface that placed the brightness, shades, and temperature sliders behind the settings/adjustment buttons instead of having them always available on the screen.
And, as you can surmise from the title of this article, I still hate this change five months later. I thought I would get used to it and start hitting the settings button more often, but actually, no. But in fact, it’s not.
Instead, I find myself not using the brightness, shadow, and temperature controls as much as I used to—maybe not even at all, really. This is a clear case of “out of sight, out of mind”.
Out of sight out of mind. I now don’t use the slider at all and open the options menu more.
Just one click and you’re done. Having these hidden, plus the more powerful options in the manual mode menu (shutter speed, focus, ISO), just ensures that I don’t reach for them anymore because I’m lazy at times and most of my photography is out of date in — a shot of the moment, rather than a carefully choreographed set-up. Then, the few times I did make the effort to get into those settings, I still hated that each slider was separate, so I had to select one and change it, then select another and change it.
Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
In comparison, look at the sheer usefulness of those ever-present screen sliders from previous versions of the Google Camera app! Swipe, swipe, swipe, snap, that’s it. Now, open the menu, swipe, tap, swipe, tap, swipe, and finally capture. This is time consuming and frustrating.
Personally, I have always used these controls in the past. I’ve easily taken over 10,000 photos with the Pixel in the past few years alone, about 10% of which were taken with quick manual adjustments. Now, because I don’t use them, my photography suffers. Yes, the Pixel’s camera is a pretty foolproof camera in most settings, but sometimes I just need to brighten those shadows or adjust the color temperature a little. Most of my use cases are small edits but they make a huge difference in the final photo.
The Pixel camera is usually foolproof, but sometimes I just need a little tweaking to get the perfect shot. The slider allows this.
I still frown when I take a photo and think to myself, “Damn, this photo needs a little editing, so I either have to delete it and retake it with the correct settings, or make sure to edit it later This photo.” Neither was a quick choice.
Oh, I’d love to have a setting to enable these sliders again for those users like me who keep reaching for them and like to have them there, always accessible.